It's a shame!

Really that is all I have to say on this.

As a business it is NOT in their best interest to be paying any "extortion" fee to have data the ISP's customers request delivered. That is between the ISP and the customer and is an anti-internet flood gate they certainly don't want to open.

...but if the ISP is the only game in town and is throttling Google's traffic heavily without payment, what choice does Google have? They can't just go over and set up a cellular network in an African country; they'd have to figure out how to buy spectrum first, and they'd be entering even more unknown territory than GFiber.

I don't think that Google is any less in favor of Net Neutrality than it ever has been; Net Neutrality is good for their bottom line. However they make enough money off of ads that sometimes the benefits (ad revenue) of tapping a captive market outweigh the troll toll imposed by the holder of that captive audience, unfortunately.

I mean, what do you do when an ISP won't budge on linking to your backbone in a reasonable manner, causing YouTube to download at one-fiftieth of the capacity of the pipe that you're using?

1.) Deal with the local authorities that should be enforcing net neutrality.

2.) In this case being Africa which probably doesnt have #1 just deal with it and/or ignore them as their number of subscribers and revenue certainly dont matter compared to the possible flood gate they could open.

The thing is there really isn't anyone to complain to for NN. It's an "idea" and nothing that really exists. especially in other countries such as Africa. Google will have to do what they're doing now, and pay up or not have their services accessed. With Orange though; if you read the article regarding what Orange had to say, Google's services are in very high demand and use more resources than others, so to keep the services from being throttled, Google has agreed to pay Orange. I see no problem with this. Its a win win for both of them. Google keeps the $$$ from ads and Orange and deliver what the customer wants. Now its only a matter of time that it happens here since its already going other places.

If the demand is high by the ISP's customers, than it is the ISP's responsibility to meet their consumers demands.

Google is a fool for allowing anyone to extort money out of them so their services could be accessed better. They are opening a box they dont want to open. Right now it is google, next it is X big website, then it is xbox live traffic, then it is netflix, then it is this and that and so on and so on until the ISP's get to choose ALL the winners and losers in ALL industries based on what they want to charge to allow their customers to access said traffic.

Orange i would say is different due to the amount of traffic is over their cellular network. But I do agree, by Google giving to Orange and others, they are going to be required to pay others. It's only a matter of time and they can only thank them selves. Especially since NN is a non-issue as you have people agreeing to paying on top of never was an issue to start off with. NN only was an "idea".